Apparently, the worst thing in the world you can do, other than harming babies and puppies, is get a cell phone for work and have your employer pay for the phone. Because when you leave said place of employment, and you return the phone to them, you're left with a contract and no phone -- which is, I have learned, akin to being a human being with blood, but no blood vessels. The useful stuff is all in there sloshing around, but you just can't access it.

I found myself in this predicament last night, and after much frustration online, I called my local Verizon store to see what they could do. And what they could do, it turns out, is wheedle me, upsell me, and insult me. But no good deal on a phone.

I laid it all out for everyone I spoke to. I have a contract, but no phone. I don't want to pay retail for a phone (even the crummiest pieces of garbage phones -- the ones they give away -- are $150 retail). I'm willing to do any kind of red tape shenanigans to get a cheap phone; restart the contract, cancel and get a new contract, invoke a lesser demon from the planet Voltron. I don't care how it happens, but I want a first-generation enV (a modest, middle of the road phone) for not much more than the $130 contract price. This is not brain surgery.

The guy on the phone is optimistic. He says, "Come in and ask for Joe or Katie. Under no circumstances should you talk to Angie. If you have to, you can talk to Sandy. But Joe is the best. Come after 7:00pm and ask for Joe. He'll definitely be able to do it for you."

So I follow his instructions. I leave my house in Isle La Motte around 6:30pm and get to the Verizon store in SoBu an hour later. Harry meets me at the door and I run down the issue with him. His first response is that I'm in a bad situation. He says it with gravity, as if I've got necrosis of the foot and I'm not actually talking about discounting a piece of plastic and wires. I reason with him.

"I want to pay you monthly. I even want to pay for the phone. They have it online for $80 with a contract, so clearly the price on the phone is oh-so-flexible, and I'm even willing to pay your $130 posted price. I just won't pay over that."

"Yeah... you really don't have any options," is his answer.

I wait for a moment. I probably blink antagonistically a few times. "Really, is that it? You're recommending I just cancel the contract?"

"Yeah," he replies.

I mention I was told to come down and Joe would hook me up. His face brightens (because Joe is clearly the doer of all things) and runs off to tell Joe that I need his help. At this point, Joe is helping someone. It's an interesting kind of helping, which involves him standing nearby while a customer speaks on the store phone to someone she knows about what type of phone to get. But fine, he's busy, and he knows I'm waiting, so I play with phones and wait.

Forty-five minutes later, I'm still waiting. I look over at Harry, who goes back to Joe and has a little powow. Harry comes back with this little tidbit:

"Uh, Joe says you have the protection plan, so you can report the phone stolen and he can give you the one-year price [of $250] for the new phone."

See if you can find the hole in that plan. Remember, I'm returning the phone to my old employer because they paid for it and it's legally theirs. Got it yet? I turn to Harry.

"Which would mean, I assume, that when my company goes to use the phone, it will be reported as stolen and unusable."

"Uh... yeah. I guess you can't do that. You'll have to talk to Joe."

I head back to play with the phone and Joe finally comes over. We aren't five words into the discussion when I realize I'm with a guy who thinks he's a "closer." He's got that salesman lilt to his voice. Like he's over-acting some kind of monologue to distance himself from the ridiculous words that are coming out of his mouth. Let me recreate this gem of a soliloquy:

"Let me run down the 'logic' here. You bought a phone from us, a nice phone, from over there. [He gestures at the PDA/Smartphone rack.] You paid what, like $500? So you spent $500 with us. And you have the lowest plan. Now I'm not saying that's bad, but that takes, like, eighteen months to recoup that. So you're paying $40 a month over two years and that's like a thousand dollars. And it'll take us time... you know, to make that back. Do you see my 'logic' here?"

I was not seeing his logic here. The way I saw it, I gave them $500 already, as well as $80 monthly (phone and data service). It wasn't entirely clear what they needed to "recoup." He continued.

"What I can do for you is this. You need to get accessories, right? You'll need a bluetooth package, a case, and a car charger, and the Vcast service to get your music, right? So I can sell you the phone for the one-year price if you'll buy those bundles. And I'll even discount them!"

Keep in mind that these bundles together (discounted) equal $109 plus $15 monthly. Added to the $250 1-year phone price, I would get a better deal just paying retail for the phone instead of taking all of the junk I don't need.

I simply responded, "I have accessories, and I have an iPod for music."

He sighed dramatically and started to explain the "logic" again, as if I was dumb. As if I wasn't getting how paying $539 was better than paying $350 for a phone which was clearly marked $130 and sells online for $80. They'll be giving these things away in Cracker Jack boxes in two months. He spoke fast, mixed metaphors, and threw in all kinds of obscure concepts. I've seen this in other people whose aim is to confuse and intimidate you. It was at that point that I realized that Joe had no interest in helping me get a non-retail phone. He also had no interest in keeping my business. I realized, disappointed, that I was going to have to walk away.

I smiled, and said,"No thanks, I'll just cancel the contract." I'm sure it was that icy cold smile that those who know me have come to recognize and enjoy. It's the "I'm done with you, but I'm pretending to be nice, so let's pretend together and get this over with," smile. Joe has never seen this smile, so can you blame him for doing the exact wrong thing?

"Awww, now you're upset," he goaded. "Don't be upset if you just can't see the 'logic' here."

It was the low blow of a man who knows he just lost the sale and is lashing out with one last-ditch effort to shame me into a purchase after trying to confuse me into a purchase. He knew it too, he would barely look at me as he completed the contract cancellation.

The kicker is that I went online and bought the same phone for $80 this morning. Even with the cancellation fee, it cost much less than the 1-year price plus accessories that Joe offered; however, I found that my SSN was flagged for credit review -- odd, because if my credit score were a phone number, it would be toll-free. Could Joe have had his revenge after all?

UPDATE: After two hours in the Verizon store last night cancelling the account, it turns out my account was not really cancelled. It was just fakely cancelled. Even though I have a little slip of paper that says the disconnect date was 05/29/08. And even though I can no longer make or receive calls, texts or emails on the phone itself.

I was told by someone at the Verizon phone center that I needed to go back to the store and re-cancel. A two hour round-trip to do, again, what I thought I did successfully last night. So I called the store to circumvent a road trip and guess who I got... what do you know, Joe!

Joe had this to say: "Well, like we discussed last night, your account was cancelled, but you would have service until June 21st."

And I had this to say: "Except the phone is disconnected now. So I don't really have service, and I'm paying through June 21st for absolutely nothing."

Listen folks, I am a hoop-jumper and a rule-follower. If you give me a set of parameters, I'll work within them. But on the flip side, I expect that when I fulfill my end of the bargain, you'll fulfill yours too. I played along with the little Verizon game of cancelling my work contract to get a personal contract, and paying the cancellation fee out of my own pocket just to make some phone calls, but now I'm ticked. Like I told the gent at the call center, I'm about two seconds away from ditching Verizon and going to Unicel. I have the Unicel plans web page open and my mouse is hovering.

I don't like getting testy with people who work in service -- really, I'm the woman who waited, smiling and joking, in the Shaw's line for 20 minutes last night while the register rebooted and lost my order. Service jobs are hard and stuff goes wrong. But today I'm snappish with the Verizon guys. There's a willfulness to their idiocy. They're already sticking me with fees and red tape, now they're even messing up their own insane procedures.

ATTENTION VERIZON: This would have all been moot if you would have let me pay you $130. I wanted to pay you $130.

FINAL (I hope) UPDATE: I managed to get the contract cancelled for real real and the new phone will arrive Monday, but not before Joe called me back, insisting on speaking to "Helen." I told him a few times it was me he spoke to previously, not this mythical Helen, but he was adamant. (Helen doesn't even sound like Tara.) Eventually, I told him I'd give Helen the message.

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After a decade in apartments, I have finally my first garden! There was a community garden in Eagle Heights, but we never got around to becoming members. And the backyard on Barbara Street was fenced, locked and off-limits. Aurora Street was a concrete jungle where residents used planters for cigarette butts and Melville Ave had a little strip of dirt (not soil) where we failed to grow anything but used car parts that kept turning up with the digging.

In order to make up for lost time, the plot this year is 35 feet by 50 feet. Because why fail at something small when you can go down in flames on a huge undertaking instead? (Speaking of failure, I have one more bread recipe suggestion from a good friend that arrived recently. More on bread difficulties after I give that one a try.) There's a five-foot strip down the center mulched with hay for the cart to drive through, and about ten rows of plantings on either side.



I found MyFolia.com -- a site that helps you track your garden plantings, trade plants with other growers, and connect with gardeners in your area. You can also blog on the site, but I tend not to post in other blog-friendly places (like MySpace) because I have Liloia.com. The site is in beta, so the closest active gardener is three hours away; however, I did find someone with a few registered window boxes in Burlington.

What I'm curious about are the trading features. While I'm more than willing to share plants, there are definite rules for doing so. The site appears to be UK-based, so I doubt it's legal for us to ship plants to each other. I suspect the site will be more useful to trading as more people come on board. Vermont is a grower-friendly state and when more of us register, we can swap in person.

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We have the most well-behaved hive of bees, ever. We suited up today and I lighted the smoker for the first time. The sisal rope smolders with lots of white plumes of smoke. It was easy to light and just a few feet of coiled rope was enough for today's tasks.

We drove the cart out to the hive and puffed the entrance a few times with the smoker. A bunch of beed hovered noisily by the entrance in a holding pattern, but they didn't seem to notice us. We smoked the top and opened it to find everyone busy on the frames. Again, none of the bees even looked up from their work.



We refilled the sugar-water feeder, removed the empty queen cage and scraped away some extra burr comb. I eventually gave up on the smoker since everyone was so calm without it. We lifted a few frames to see the progress. There wasn't a whole lot of comb being built, but they've only been in the hive for a week. Considering what a wet, cold week we've had, the ladies were all in a good mood. We didn't find the queen, but our eyes aren't trained to pick her out yet.

All in all, we were finished in about ten minutes. It takes longer to suit up than to work with the bees. I learned last time that my sunscreen agitates them, so I made sure to do the bee tasks before the garden tasks. Now we won't need to bother them again for another 3-4 weeks.

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I am head over heels for bees today. We humans are enjoying the brief bit of sunshine in an otherwise rainy and cold week, but there are 14,000 girls who are absolutely thrilled with the good weather. I understood that they'd be foraging in our fields, but I didn't quite grasp it until today. I stood on the deck and the backyard was vibrating with bee activity. You can hear the hum stretch into the distance. Now I can't say for sure that they're all from our hive, but I've never seen this many bees in our fields before today.

I got a little intoxicated with all of the buzzing and took about 500 bee photos. Just be glad I'm only showing you three here.












"Look at us, we're simply covered with pollen!"

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I unsubscribed from the FlyLady list after several weeks of trying to make it work. For those who haven't met her, FlyLady is a cleaning and clutter-busting expert who offers a home management system for keeping a household running.

Going from a one-floor condo to a big farmhouse has increased the number of my maintenance chores exponentially. Dave, as awesome as he is about keeping things running around here, now has five acres of land to tend. Mowing it alone takes a full weekend day. So the inside is primarily my responsibility.

I found FlyLady and made my daily cleaning lists, which work well for maintenance and de-cluttering. I changed a few of her tips; lace-up shoes are impractical when I have to change shoes several times a day for different tasks. (Don't wear the muddy gardening boots in the kitchen!) And there are only so many times I can remove twenty-seven pieces of clutter from a room before it looks like an IKEA showroom. I need to keep a few personal items around.

The trouble is not the cleaning advice, but the email newsletter. It's ironic that on a clutter-cleanup list, there are over 30 broadcast messages a day.The volume of incoming email is extreme; I have several FlyLady filters set up and still about fifteen messages get through the net daily.

So how do you fill 30 messages a day with content? Some are reminder notices; start the laundry, shine your sink, etc. They might be useful, except that they rarely arrive in my inbox at a relevant time. I keep getting "put your shoes on for the day" messages after 11:00pm, or "Tuesday is clean the living room day" reminders on Wednesday night.

Some of the messages are missions -- special areas that need to be cleaned on that particular day. Again, when they come in at the end of the day or the next day, they're fairly useless. And if you're using your task list, a reminder email isn't necessary.

The rest of the messages are a mix of lengthy essays on why it's important to stay organized and a large number of rambling testimonials from other people using the program. I'm already on the program -- I don't need convincing ten times a day.

The kicker is that when I unsubscribed, I received a bewildered autoreply from FlyLady that condemned me for leaving the list because I "hate change." Exqueeze me? In the last year alone I renovated a house, moved to an island, took a job, quit a job, started beekeeping, and switched breakfast cereal from Rice Krispies to Raisin Bran (<- not easy!). I hate change?!

The letter also said that I felt her reminders were "negative voices from my past." Uh huh. Or maybe they're just way too much junk mail.

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Costco scares me, but I'll walk across burning coals for 12 sheets each of 20 colors of tissue paper for $7.



I have an idea for a rack of dowels on the wall to store these babies.

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These are adorable little houses that I pass on the way to the DC office in the morning. In some areas, it looks like the neighbors collaborated to coordinate their colors. It all looks very colonial.



I wonder how they mow their tiny front and back yards. It can't be practical to buy a lawnmower for five square feet. Communal mowers? Landscaping service? At least one of them took the,"you don't have to mow overgrown vines," approach to their lawn.

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I thought the box o' 13,000 bees would be scary. I brought bee suits, helmets, gloves and veils for the car ride home from the bee place, but it was quiet and compact enough to sit in the hatchback with a barely audible buzz.



Dave and Trevor (all suited up) set up the sugar water feeder. Turns out, with all that protective equipment, only one bee landed on my shoulder and she promptly noticed I wasn't a flower and took off. None of the little ladies were hostile and few even noticed us at all. When we wandered back out to the hive area later that night and the next day, no one suited up. We just gave the ladies their space and watched from a few feet away.



This is the little queen box that was suspended in the larger container. There's a queen in there somewhere. We saw her, but she wouldn't stand still for a picture.



So now the bees are all settled into the hive, just in time for a 50-degree rainstorm with gusty Adirondack Mountain winds. Those bees are saying, "We came all the way from Claxton, Georgia for this?!"

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This was a week of bee-related activities. Dave called Betterbee and moved up our bee pickup date, and they expedited our hive and tools to arrive sooner. Trevor was very excited about his very own bee suit and proceeded to tear it out of the package and put it on while I was checking through the invoice list. They don't technically sell child-sized suits, so I got the smallest adult size available. It's not too bad to have a bee suit with extra arm and leg coverage. And I can hem up those pants in ten minutes.



The hive usually comes as unassembled as bare pine sides; however, my DIY starter kit has been backordered since February. I substitued the assembled hive in order to have it before the bee pickup date. Because the frames I bought were plastic, they were reused from some other hive and were fragrant with the smell of beeswax and honey. All in all, the scent of fresh pine and honey is enough to make anyone swoon.

The hive needed two coats of paint. The nice thing about having renovated in the last year is that we started out in our first home with plenty of tools and hardware doodads around. I already had paint trays, unused 6" rollers, brushes, plastic tarps and stirrers. Unfortunately, the can I had stored away in the garage had hardened over the winter. I made a quick trip to Alburgh for some barn & fence paint -- surely hardy enough for beehive use. (I opted for it because it was $10 less per gallon than exterior paint.)



With two light coats, the wood was covered and the hive was ready for the field. Clearly, it was bee-approved because a friendly little ground bee from the herb garden came over to take a look. He walked around on the freshly-painted hive and asked if there were any apartments for rent. Alas, we are booked through 2009, but next spring there may be some new construction when a second hive arrives.

Trevor helped me load up the truck, sweep off the concrete footer, and place the boxes. And by "helped" I mean lashed the tops off dandelions with a garden stake sword and begged to drive the lawn tractor back to the house. But it's there, and it's ready for the bees to arrive tomorrow. The question is... am I ready for the bees to arrive tomorrow?

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Today, we are friends and we will share the windowsill.

Tomorrow, we will not.

We will get back to you about Saturday.

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A couple of weeks ago, I received a JetBlue alert that my flight had changed; however, the email was blank in the area for listing the changes. I logged in and nothing seemed different than my printed itinerary, so I chalked it up to a technical error. Sure enough, an hour or so later, I received an apologetic email about the mistaken change alert. We all go on our merry way.

I mentioned to Dave how easy it is to send out incorrect email blasts -- having sent those mass messages to immense member lists almost daily for the past five years. At my first week at DFA, I was sending messages alone for only the second or third time when I realized, with a sick feeling, that I had sent a message intended for North Dakota to the entire email list.

And there was the time that I accidentally used our Executive Director's real email address in the reply-to field. He had about 50,000 messages to sort through the next day. It happens.

But it doesn't happen often, (my rate is three in five years, which is less than 0.1%.) so I was a little surprised to get a second flight change alert this week from JetBlue. Again, the relevant information was blank and the flight route mentioned was one I've never traveled or booked. And again, I received an apology email shortly afterwards, along with a few other people.



Sure, there's a little bit of schadenfreude, watching someone else hit the wrong button. But there's a little relief as well. I may have once asked some donors to support a guy 2,000 miles away, but at least no one showed up for the wrong flight.

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I have found cookie heaven. By following my sister-in-law's mother-in-law's recipe, I finally ended up with buttery, tender cookies with shiny, solid icing on top. They look like something you'd buy shink-wrapped at Easter. Hooray!

Trevor wandered over while he was supposed to be doing homework to see what I was up to. He glazed a couple himself, then manned the sanding sugar. He added a dollop of blue food coloring to some of the pink to make his own indigo cookie. (The spot on his chin is blue food coloring.)



When in doubt, ask someone's Italian mother. Grazie, Maria!

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Wednesday night was our town Selectboard meeting; and though these meetings generally take quite a while, I never expected it to last four hours. One of my items was in the middle of the agenda, but the other was dead last and I wanted to be there for it.

I usually have Trevor with me, so I need to duck out around 9:30 to get him to bed, but he asked to stay home -- which helped both of us. He was able to finish his homework and do his evening chores without rushing and I was able to stay until the very end of the meeting. He had a list of rules (no cooking, no phone calls, call the neighbors if he had any questions) and I was two minutes away by car. It all went very well. I came home to completed homework, fed & happy cats and a sleeping boy.

I usually bring some little piece of hand sewing to each meeting. Besides keeping me occupied in what is otherwise a very "in the weeds" meeting (learn everything you've ever wanted to know about grading roadbeds!), the sewing helps me ignore the drone and flicker of the flourescent lighting which otherwise drives me buggy.



I started and finished this little piece last night... a holiday topiary cross stitch that I got last fall. I'm so late with finishing it that I'm now early for Christmas 2008. And I finally mastered the art of making good French knots. I tied the final knot as the Selectboard chair announced, "Meeting adjourned."

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I've given up on bread for the moment and focused back on what works well for me -- desserts. I asked my sister-in-law's mother-in-law (figure that one out) to send me her recipe for sugar cookies. Hers are crumbly and soft, not like my crisp version.



After trying her instructions, I think my three previous mistakes were rolling the dough too thin, cooking it for too long, and using butter that was too cold and stiff. These came out much more chewy and tender.

Next... on to the icing.

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Michelle, in an attempt to rescue me from another bread-baking disaster, emailed me a link to this fine recipe. It's called No-Knead Bread, from the New York Times. And, indeed, I did not knead it at all.



It was working swimmingly well, right up until the baking part. I had bubbly, soft dough that rose the way it was supposed to and promised to be a fluffy, tall loaf. Thirty minutes into baking, the bread changed it's mind and reverted back to a flat, pouty little foccacia-like crispbread. I can only imagine there's something wrong with my oven calibration or my yeast activity. Or my DNA.

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When a bell rings, an angel gets his wings. And when a gentile burns her latkes, somewhere a Bubbe cries, "Oy vey!"



Clearly, I did not do this right... unless latkes are supposed to be an unpalatable war between charred grated turnips and raw grated potatoes.



I turned down the heat, squeezed out more liquid and tried again with smaller handfuls. The second batch came out much better, but they still sponged up olive oil at an alarming rate and never quite seemed to cook in the center. Oy Gevalt.

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The other day I inexplicably turned on The Today Show while making the bed and I was horrified by a segment that profiled a working mother who had picked up a second job in order to make ends meet. In itself, the piece wasn't remarkable except that the tone was exuberant, as if second jobs were the hot new accessory for working moms. Second jobs were touted as the solution to high gas and food prices. Second jobs will save the middle class. Hooray for second jobs!

I find it hard to believe that 1) the solution to the problem of soaring prices for basic needs rests on the already heavily-laden shoulders of working mothers, and 2) the way for American families to make ends meet is to work more.

If one woman picking up some after-hours tailoring work is going to end rice shortages, gas price hikes and $5-per-gallon milk, I'll gladly become a part-time caterer during evenings and weekends to end genocide and reduce global warming. Because that's how planetary-scale crises are solved, right? Ladies, how did these immense and complex problems fall upon us and our already-precious non-working time?

Angela, the Today Show's guest expert, added that the most important consideration with working moms' second jobs is to ensure that the work doesn't interfere with your primary job. Really? That's the most important factor? Don't worry if you become estranged from your husband after falling into bed exhausted after the evening shift at your other career. Shrug and keep going if your children haven't seen you in four days and can't remember the last time you smiled. Don't fret if your idea of rest and relaxation is a nap on the subway between jobs. Just make sure that Boss #1 is taken care of!

So many working mothers have only a tiny sliver of time each evening to care for home and family -- most are stretched to their limit already. Already they finish their work day, run to childcare, pick up the kids, feed them, help with homework, tuck everyone in, then fall asleep themselves, just to start the routine all over again the next day. Where does job #2 fit?

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